On the KnpLabs blog there's a new post from Ryan Weaver sharing some cool things you can do with Composer you might not have known about when managing your application's dependencies.

For those of you that are comfortable with Composer, I wanted to talk about a few lesser-known, but really fantastic features. These are inspired by real questions I've heard while running around the country doing my one-man composer-and-dancing show (i.e. conference talks).

He shares four of them with a fifth that's more of an "upcoming feature" than a current one:

Autoloading & Performance: "I thought class maps were the fastest?"

Running Post-Deploy Scripts

"What if I need to fork a library?"

Can I host private packages on Packagist?

What about signing the authenticity of Packages?

That last one about package signing is still on the known issues list and is under discussion, but no doubt that future versions of the tool will support it.

On the SitePoint PHP Blog today, Harry Fuecks takes a look at why PHP from a sysadmin's perspective.

A funny from the Python crowd: phpfilterâ€”PHP "support" under CherryPy. There is a serious side to that thoughâ€”it's spitting out something that looks like a PHP parse errorâ€”i.e. this is a developer problem (e.g. someone ftpâ€™d a PHP straight onto their live web server for â€œtestingâ€), not a runtime error.

More to the point, when was the last time you saw a PHP runtime error take down an entire application or web server? And no - "MySQL Connection Failed: Can't connect to local MySQL server" doesnâ€™t countâ€”PHP and the web server are still runningâ€”the MySQL server (or otherwise) is to blame.

He also looks at a slightly different method for serving up web applications - with FastCGI. He talks about the basic features of a server (forking, threading, asynchronous I/O) and how that explains how we've ended up with PHP being the "lesser of the evils"...

On the SitePoint PHP Blog today, Harry Fuecks takes a look at why PHP from a sysadmin's perspective.

A funny from the Python crowd: phpfilterâ€”PHP "support" under CherryPy. There is a serious side to that thoughâ€”it's spitting out something that looks like a PHP parse errorâ€”i.e. this is a developer problem (e.g. someone ftpâ€™d a PHP straight onto their live web server for â€œtestingâ€), not a runtime error.

More to the point, when was the last time you saw a PHP runtime error take down an entire application or web server? And no - "MySQL Connection Failed: Can't connect to local MySQL server" doesnâ€™t countâ€”PHP and the web server are still runningâ€”the MySQL server (or otherwise) is to blame.

He also looks at a slightly different method for serving up web applications - with FastCGI. He talks about the basic features of a server (forking, threading, asynchronous I/O) and how that explains how we've ended up with PHP being the "lesser of the evils"...